“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.“
– Heraclitus, Greek philosopher
OUR seventh anniversary is near, so Jillian and I have been reminiscing, not romantically, but in that “can-you-believe-we-survived-this” kind of way.
Yes, we survived.
More than that, we endured.
We were young, poor and foolish enough to think that love alone could outshout family disapproval.
She walked away from the stability of life with a schoolteacher, the sort of man parents hope their daughters marry.
Predictable, steady and safe.
I, on the other hand, was seen as a reckless bet.
By choosing me, they told her she was ruining her future.
Truthfully, for a while, I thought maybe they had a point.
But there’s a quiet stubbornness in conviction.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes because I was tired of nodding along, living by rules written by people who never walked in my shoes.
From then on, certainty no longer mattered.
We were built by what we went through and held together by what we believed in.
Day after day, we made a choice to stand with each other even when every voice around us said: “don’t”.
There’s a moment, though, that we often revisit, somehow capturing everything we were and everything we hoped to become.
My wife, Jillian, and I stood at the edge of the frozen river, contemplating our mortality.
The map had promised a footbridge but all we saw were jagged slabs of ice, thrusting up at strange angles, as if the river had fractured, shifted and then refrozen.
Beneath the ice, ever so faintly, we could hear the muffled rush of water.
We had been skiing (at one point, she’d laughed and said I moved like a baby giraffe on rollerblading) for two and a half hours to get to this spot, deep in the backcountry of the Adirondacks, and now we had a dilemma.
Our route was a loop and we had almost completed it.
The temperature was bitterly cold.
If we crossed the river, it would be a short and easy ski home.
If we turned around, it would be another two and a half hours, much of it uphill.
Did I mention we were both amateurs?
It’s a dangerous age when muscle memory mixes easily with hubris and self-deception.
Bad decisions can result.
To some extent, this moment was the whole point of the expedition – to escape the endless, quotidian routines of the early stages of working life.
I mean, seriously: When did excitement become finding a four-pack of extra-fine wool blend socks at a supermarket for $16.99?
(Though that is kind of thrilling.)
Jillian and I had been together since Form 5, over 20 years, and we’d been content.
No affairs.
No impulsive changes in career.
No professional crisis.
Perhaps the challenge of crossing this precariously frozen river was, if not a crisis, then a summons.
Perhaps we had been seeking this moment without even realising it.
Initially, I was very much against crossing, for all of the obvious reasons.
Jillian was slightly more inclined to consider the possibility.
She is funny this way.
A New York-based hepatologist whose outlook on life is generally governed by logic.
Imagine if Dr Spock had an iron-willed Vulcan daughter who loved scientific journals, the Arctic and Ironman competitions.
That’d be her.
But every so often, she gets this gleam in her eyes.
It’s kind of a crazy look.
A touch of summit fever.
It’s spooky and kind of sexy, and deeply annoying all at once.
Together we tested the ice with our ski poles.
Seemed pretty solid.
Our 50-kilogramme golden retriever, Vico (named by my daughter after Giambattista Vico, the 18th-century Italian philosopher who didn’t think math had all the answers), outfitted in his sporty orange hunter’s vest, also poked around the edge of the ice and then looked up at us, the way dogs do as if to say: You can’t be serious.
The whole scene evoked a powerful sense of déjà vu to half a ‘lifetime’ earlier when we stood at the edge of another dangerous waterway.
We were in our late 20s, evaluating the risk-reward of leaving everything familiar behind to pursue postgraduate studies in the United States on scholarship.
We took the leap.
Once, we were hiking the Kalalau Trail in Kauai, Hawaii.
It was an arduous, 18-kilometre trek to a remote beach, where we’d camped for a few days.
Then we turned around and hiked back along the same trail.
Three kilometres before completing our journey, we encountered a stream called Hanakapiai.
We crossed it on our way in, but since then there’d been heavy rains and now the stream was flooded and had become a raging river.
On the far bank, we saw a large crowd of backpackers.
They were, apparently, too frightened (and too sensible) to attempt a crossing.
The real danger wasn’t the stream but what lay beyond – where it spilled into the ocean and the currents were treacherous.
On the beach, there was a sign with a death tally of those who’d waded into those waters and never came back.
I knew someone on the list: the father of a kid who’d gone to university with me.
Waiting for the stream to subside didn’t seem to be an option because – don’t laugh – we had a wedding to attend.
We were at that point in our lives where everyone was getting married and the energy felt like a whirlwind.
We didn’t want to miss it.
Plus, there was a rope.
It was tied securely between two palm trees on opposite sides of the stream.
It seemed to be an invitation.
“Think we can cross it?” I asked her.
She nodded.
We strapped on our enormous backpacks and clung to that rope for dear life as we battled the current.
When we emerged on the far side, the backpackers cheered.
I pumped my fist triumphantly.
We raced to the wedding, hearts pounding, eyes gleaming.
Last month, years after the first time, deep in the Adirondack woods, there we stood again, at the edge of the jagged ice.
These two moments felt like the beginning and the end of something, with our lives in the middle.
Somehow, our ‘babies’ have grown into 13, 10 and 5.
Bella, our firstborn and full-time rebel, is about to get a smartphone and already one foot out the door.
An empty nest loomed.
Many of the weddings that we had attended, all those years ago, had ended in separation or stalemate.
“What do you think?” I asked Jillian. “Can we cross it?”
She hesitated and I understood.
Of course, we could cross it.
Or try to, anyhow.
But was that really still the question?
Or was it more like: should we cross it?
Given who we are today – older, wiser and, yes, more boring – especially me.
I oversee household finances with the same rigour I’d apply to a P&L: everything runs through budgets, cash flow projections, and cost-benefit filters.
We have what we once dreamed of: a house, a trust fund, cars, children and a loyal Vico.
At night, we often lay awake in bed, worrying about our kids’ school activities and our parents’ health.
All of it, the whole sometimes weighty lot of it, felt like the preamble to an impulsive decision.
Together we surveyed the frozen river one last time, then locked eyes.
The river hummed beneath the ice, seductive and insistent, pulling us toward its edge as if it understood us better than we understood ourselves.
“What would we tell our kids to do?” she asked finally.
And that settled it.
We had flirted with the danger of the river just enough to send a jolt through our hearts but we had enough sense to ignore its call.
And it felt good.
Because when you’re young, the river owns you.
Together we turned and followed Vico, who was already trotting back up the hill, commencing the long journey home.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com
